Eugenics, which had started long before my time, had once been defined as including free love and prevention of conception... Recently it had cropped up again in the form of selective breeding.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Sanger notes that early eugenics included ideas like free love and birth control, later morphing into selective breeding.
- In plain terms
- Eugenics once embraced free love and birth control, later shifting to selective breeding.
- What can you take from it?
- Recognize how scientific movements can change focus over time.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- What drives the transformation of scientific ideas?
- How can we prevent harmful reinterpretations of progressive concepts?
Another view
The connection between free love and eugenics is historically contested.
More from Margaret Sanger
...we explained simply what contraception was; that abortion was the wrong way - no matter how early it was performed it was taking a life; that contraception …
Permalink to quote #11 I accepted one branch of this philosophy, but eugenics without birth control seemed to me a house built upon sands. It could not stand against the furious wind…
Permalink to quote #13 Our 'overhead' expense in segregating the delinquent, the defective and the dependent, in prisons, asylums and permanent homes, our failure to segregate morons…
Permalink to quote #10
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